Captain’s pick: call for ship operator

The CSIRO is seeking an operator for its new research vessel – the RV Investigator, now under construction in a Singapore shipyard – to begin pre-commissioning activities.

The ship management contract is expected to be signed in May this year. Key personnel will be on standby in Singapore from then until August for ship systems training, maintenance implementation and sea trials.

Once it is in full service next year, the $120 million ship will play a major role in crucial Australian ocean research programs related to climate change. This could include changes in ocean temperatures, shifts in ocean currents and possible variations in pH levels in response to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Melbourne-based tenders specialist TenderSearch says the closing date for applications to operate the ship is February 6. The CSIRO held a briefing for interested parties in Hobart on January 18.

Compared to the blue-water research vessel, the 66-metre RV Southern Surveyor, RV Investigator will have sizeable technical advances. Drop keels will deploy instrumentation well below the bubble zone generated by the ship’s motion through water.

It is being built to standards minimising radiated noise from machinery on board, which will all be on resilient mountings. A fixed gondola will contain sensors that, among other things, will allow multi-beam swath mapping of the seabed, giving much wider coverage on each pass.

Although 60 per cent of Australian territory is ocean, only 12 per cent of this has so far been mapped. The new vessel will provide a safe, technically advanced mobile research platform with a wide range, from the Antarctic to the tropics, covering the Indian, Southern and Pacific oceans.

The CSIRO says it will help develop geological resources, and detect and predict changes in the ocean environment, and improve knowledge of marine ecosystems, biodiversity and fisheries.

Research teams will be able to add purpose-built systems to support their own research, such as radiation and trace metal laboratories, deep water dredging, coring and drilling devices, fishing nets, towed camera systems and remotely operated vehicles.

Researchers will be able to integrate this material in real time with data from satellite sensors, autonomous vehicles and shore-based models.

The RV Investigator comes under the Future Research Vessel project, part of the Super Science Initiative, financed from the Federal Education Investment Fund.

The delivery voyage to Hobart in September will be followed by testing until February. Full operations begin in October next year.

Most winches are electrically powered. The main winches are below decks for protection from the weather. They have a combination of wire synthetic ropes. An A frame at the stern can take a 20 tonne load.

Ship manoeuvrability is enhanced with a retractable bow thruster.

This allows the captain to move the bow of the ship directly either way, fine tuning the exact direction of the thrust, while getting the whole apparatus out of the way once the ship is under way.